This one actually sets a new record at p640 but is not as good dvgrn's p640+8n for larger periods. Here is a record p80 based on the p640 loop that is actually a bit smaller than the area predicted by my script. The central Snarks have been adjusted and my script is not clever enough (and never will be) to realise that.

chris_c wrote:Going further along these lines I added a triple adjustable p1072 and p1070...
Both of these guns can be made to work at lower periods but it seems like the area actually has to increase. For example here is a p920...

That gun is smaller than your p640 at periods from 824 up to 888 and it sets an outright record at p848, but actually your p640 starts to win again after that. The reason is because your p640 has so much slack to take advantage of. For example here is a p912 = ( 640 + 34 * 8 ) that has exactly the same height as the basic p640:

With the p824 I think once you extend by 10 cells you have taken up all the slack. After that every 2 increases in the width need 1 increase in the height.

In the case of the p640 you can extend by 34 cells by only adjusting the width as shown above. After that every 3 increases in the width require 1 increase in the height. I only just realised this fact now and pushed a new patch. Unfortunately I had made a mistake with the exact bounding box in the previous p640 so some records have been lost.

EDIT: Just noticed your edit. It seems we agree on the behaviour of the p824. When looking at the p640 in more detail the fact that the bounding box grows in the ratio 3:1 was quite a surprise for me.

EDIT2: Oh, no. There are bunch more reflectors in that second gun. What is the base gun you are proposing here? And how does it grow?

EDIT3: OK, in the form you posted it that gun grows in 2:1 ratio but if the figure eights are liberated on to the other side of the syringe input lane you get something like this which should grow in a 4:1 ratio. This stuff is just way too confusing!

Doesn't look like the version without the east loop would improve anything -- that would be p678+8N, or a little less with some welding. I've built a few silly speculative loops like the following, as well, but they don't appear to reduce anything either:

EDIT: It just occurred to me that guns with internal signal crossings that are being doubled by semi-Snarks have a lot more adjustability than I'm used to. Alternate signals can be moved to anywhere where they don't collide with anything, because they're just being used to reset the semi-Snark anyway. Not sure if this will end up fixing any tentative guns, but it might be worth a try sometimes.

EDIT 2: Some of the Hall of Shame are going to be easy to improve at least a little bit. Here's a p1014+8N, a quick rebuild of the p358+8N to add plenty of slack:

Cool. I added that one. It also sets new records at p894 and p942. I increased the slack up to 23 with some welding but that doesn't have any effect before p1000 anyway.

I also added your recent p848 and a related p752. Together they set quite a few records and obsolete your p640 and p824.

dvgrn wrote:It just occurred to me that guns with internal signal crossings that are being doubled by semi-Snarks have a lot more adjustability than I'm used to. Alternate signals can be moved to anywhere where they don't collide with anything, because they're just being used to reset the semi-Snark anyway. Not sure if this will end up fixing any tentative guns, but it might be worth a try sometimes.

At first I thought you were right but then I realised that the above argument only applies when there are an even number of signals in the loop! Unfortunately that is not the case in any of the period doubled tentative guns.

dvgrn wrote:..it already makes a p583 that's at least somewhat nicer:

There was already a better p583 lurking in the tentative section as p01038_16:

Next job is to keep better track of the minimal form of tentative guns and to try to add recent guns from the Kazyan/simsim collections.

EDIT: I added a confirmed guns directory to keep track of the minimal functioning form of tentatively suggested guns. It turns out that the tentative suggestion of p250 as a semi-snark doubled p125 is no longer a record when the necessary tweaks have been made.

Here is the updated hall of shame (the format is period, period mod 8, (area, description)).

dvgrn wrote:It just occurred to me that guns with internal signal crossings that are being doubled by semi-Snarks have a lot more adjustability than I'm used to...

At first I thought you were right but then I realised that the above argument only applies when there are an even number of signals in the loop! Unfortunately that is not the case in any of the period doubled tentative guns.

Hmm, another good reminder that I shouldn't post any sudden new ideas that I have after 10pm. Note to self: if the number of signals is even, you just take out half of the signals and save a semi-Snark...

chris_c wrote:Note that p151, p463 and p471 have tentative suggestions. I don't know if they work or not.

p151 is no problem. I'll leave the other ones for someone else, but they're 99.9% sure to be workable. Just possibly the p151 could be made a little smaller with a double-crossing loop to the north instead of the west, but I don't want to think about it.

Well, there are some easy targets in the Hall of Shame still. When the p557 is adjusted that far out, you can easily dent in a corner of the loop and at least keep the bounding box below 10K. Here's p701+8N adjusted to make p749 and p757, and of course the other three would work equally well:

I've been doing some more work on the gun collection. Before the appearance of the Syringe there were over 300 guns in the range p100-p1000 that had bounding box above 10,000 cells. Now (according to my script at least) this p549 is the only one:

Looking again at the p119 that I gave up on a while back, it's perfectly obvious that the loop and the singleton Snark should simply be swapped. That produces a p571+8N gun family that sets various records:

Very funky weld, thanks! I'll have to check if that can be used in any other guns.

Based on the latest checkin, apparently you did, and they could. And speaking of that, and of funky welds, I had to really scrape the bottom to knock p991 out of the Hall of Shame. I didn't know (or remember, anyway) that mirror-image Snarks could stand to be quite this close together:

dvgrn wrote:And speaking of that, and of funky welds, I had to really scrape the bottom to knock p991 out of the Hall of Shame. I didn't know (or remember, anyway) that mirror-image Snarks could stand to be quite this close together:

chris_c wrote:I've been doing some more work on the gun collection. Before the appearance of the Syringe there were over 300 guns in the range p100-p1000 that had bounding box above 10,000 cells. Now...
541 (9882, 'p00954_16_p00541') ( 5 mod 8 )

When I try to reconstitute a p541 as a base for looking for something better, I can't seem to reduce the area below 162x63 = 10206:

dvgrn wrote:
When I try to reconstitute a p541 as a base for looking for something better, I can't seem to reduce the area below 162x63 = 10206. Am I missing a trick here?

Just quickly: shift the right hand Syringe NE by 4 cells; shift the northern Snarks SE by 2 cells; shift the left hand Syringe east by 4 cells. That knocks 2 cells off the height and leaves the glider loop the same length overall.

All of these guns exist concretely in the "confirmed" directory. e.g. p00954_16_p00541.

To everyone else: thanks for the welding tricks. I will try to get a proper update done tomorrow.

chris_c wrote:... shift the right hand Syringe NE by 4 cells; shift the northern Snarks SE by 2 cells; shift the left hand Syringe east by 4 cells. That knocks 2 cells off the height and leaves the glider loop the same length overall.

Ah, of course. Can't see a degree of freedom that's right under my nose sometimes.

Speaking of unseen possibilities, here's p725+8N, a reconfiguration of p549+8N with quite a bit of slack, improving on later stages of p701+8N:

Looks like there are still some gains to be made with loops that are more Herschel and less glider, too. Herschel loops are bulkier than Snarks, but Herschels travel slower than gliders, so for the high-period loops it comes out about even:

chris_c wrote:Thanks for all those guns. Some nice improvements there. After those additions I ran Hersrch on the Hall of Shame and it managed to find 5 reductions.

That's the most recent hacked Hersrch from a few years ago, right? There are a bunch more conduits to add now, though I suppose most of the new ones are large and slow and high-period enough that they won't help very much with this project.

I decided to get a little more organized, and made the beginnings of a table of 90-degree timing adjusters -- composite conduits that can be swapped for each other to get different periods:

The two on the bottom are color-changing turners -- can be swapped for a p5/6/7/8 reflector or a semi-Snark. All the composite turners are shown one step out from the minimum adjustment, where a three-cell weld is needed between two eaters.

It would be nice if the top row included more parity-changing turners besides the Snarks-only ones. The lack of those means that I'm mostly only getting even-period guns by modifying small odd-period guns, usually by swapping out three-Snark loops.

The new guns are coming out just about the same size as the old ones, but generally just a little bigger -- there tends to be a lot of wasted space in the middle. The occasional improvement has popped up:

chris_c wrote:The most desirable gun to go for next would be a 5 mod 8 gun that improves periods 669, 677, 685 and 693.

Haven't turned up anything along those lines yet. The above syringe+Snark loops add 121 ticks or 139 ticks or 149 ticks (+/-8N) if you replace a three-Snark loop, and a three-Snark loop is 216+8N ticks slower than a plain Snark. So we could get a competitive p669 if we had a period 669-121 = p548 gun with an available 3-Snark loop, or a period 669-121-216=p332 with an accessible single Snark.

Which... we don't. The p532 family creates p532+216+121+/-8N=p853+8N guns, though:

The p532+216+139 and p532+216+149 families don't quite set any records, I don't think.

How else could the above composite-90-degree toolkit be extended or used? Are there more H-to-Gs that are small enough to include? Are there small G-to-2Gs where the extra glider output was the wrong color, where we might try swapping in the two color-changing turners?